Black and White Smoke: C-Suite Woes: Subtlety has limits

5 Star Review

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Editorial Book Review:

By Jessica Smith

Corporate thrillers live or die by one thing: whether the world they build feels like it could actually exist. The boardrooms in bad ones feel like sets. The power plays feel choreographed. The stakes feel borrowed from somewhere else. Thomas Vincent Papa clearly knows the territory he is writing about from the inside, and that knowledge is what gives Black and White Smoke its particular charge. This is a corporate world that feels genuinely inhabited, where the danger is real precisely because the mechanisms producing it are so recognizable.

Reading it produces the specific unease of watching someone navigate a situation where the rules keep shifting and nobody is telling you which ones still apply. Jon Kiza is a fascinating protagonist precisely because he is not the obvious choice for the role the story forces him into. A behind-the-scenes CFO suddenly exposed when the CEO vanishes, thrust into a race for the top job against a charismatic rainmaker who has been playing this particular game far longer, his discomfort is the reader's discomfort, and Papa uses that identification with real skill. The paranoia builds the way it does in the best financial thrillers, not through dramatic revelation but through the slow accumulation of details that don't quite add up.

What Papa is really writing about sits beneath the corporate espionage and the power struggle. This is a book about what information does to people, how the possession of it warps judgment, corrodes trust, and eventually turns colleagues into adversaries. In an era where data firms sit at the center of some of the most consequential decisions being made anywhere, that theme carries a weight that extends well past the fiction.

The writing is crisp and the pacing rarely lets you settle. The multiple city settings give the story an international texture that keeps the world feeling genuinely large.

For readers who loved Succession and want that same cocktail of ambition, paranoia, and razor-sharp observation about power, this book delivers it with impressive confidence.

About the Author 

Thomas Vincent Papa

Thomas Vincent Papa is a corporate reporting professional, technical writer, and author of corporate thrillers. Based in Brussels, he has more than 30 years of experience spanning investment analysis, management consulting, auditing, and corporate reporting.

Over the past 18 years, he has contributed to the development of corporate reporting standards and authored technical papers, investor-focused blogs, and industry articles. Originally from Kenya, Thomas has also lived in the United Kingdom, South Africa, Spain, and the United States, bringing a global perspective to both his professional work and fiction writing.

His interests include leadership, politics, economics, psychology, technology, combat sports, and espionage fiction.